Page 10 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • October 5, 2011 Glen Rock Glenn Grube explores Lost City of Machu Picchu by John Koster Glen Rock architect Glenn Grube took his capacity audience at the Glen Rock Library on a thinking person’s tour of the Sacred Valley of the Inca, culminating in an He pointed out that the last existing Inca altar stone – recently chipped by accident while making a beer commercial – indicated the major directions, including magnetic north, with flawless accuracy and that the Inca builders had provided 16 fountains within the city fed by low-lying stone aqueducts. The pre-Columbian Indians had no metal tools but had designed the huge Cyclopean walls to withstand earthquakes by giving the gigantic stones just enough room to shift during tremors without shattering the integrity of the walls. Grube was vastly impressed with the Incan skill and conveyed that awe to his audience. Machu Picchu, Grube said, had been developed in around 1385 and abandoned – even before the arrival of the Spanish – around 1530. The city, actually only about the size of Glen Rock from Maple Avenue to the rock that gave the borough its name, probably housed only 800 to 1,000 people. Many of the theories advanced about Machu Picchu – that it had been the last redoubt of the Inca monarchs or the harem of the Virgins of the Sun – have long since been dismissed by archaeologists. But the mysteries that still remain engendered curiosity from Grube’s audience and made the lecture one of the best, and best-attended, in architectural appreciation of the Lost City of Machu Picchu. “These sites are always, always tied in with cosmology, astronomy, and the solar pattern,” Grube told his audience. “They were masters of design and urban planning.” Above: A view of the city of Cuzco. Left: Native dancers at Ollantaytambo. recent memory. Explorer Hiram Bingham made Machu Picchu famous when he “discovered” the Lost City in 1911 – though Bingham admitted that he had found the name “Lizarraga” and the date “1902” scrawled on a boulder and several Spanish-speaking or German explorers had put in plausible claims to have seen it first. However, Bingham’s photographs, which filled an entire issue of National Geographic, made the “Lost City (continued on page 13)